I do think Ironman is an absurd distance for pros and agers to be racing regularly. I Don’t think 70.3 is though.
Obviously that is just my own personal impression, based on there being a bit of an inflection point on the injury risk as you go from 70.3 to ironman.
I think people would be healthier and have more fun with triathlon if 70.3 was the ‘gold standard’, if history had worked out that way, and 70.3 was what inspired people. But it isn’t.
I agree with this. IM is really absurd for the typical AGer. For those FFOP and elite/pros, not absurd, but they’re either super gifted and/or willing to train 20+ hours per week so they don’t totally melt down on the run.
For an AGer to slog through that - it’s usually a death march of some sort for most of the marathon with tons of walking, even if you prepared well for it, since that distance is just so ridiculous.
This is just my opinion as well, but I think the media allure of saying “I did an IRONMAN!” really does a big disservice to a lot of newb as well as BOMOP and slower triathletes who take on this crazy distance. Invariably, these slow folks simply can’t even put in the time to even put up a respectable swim (need too much time to bike/run) and often miss the cutoff. Futhermore, they’re spending so much time doing uber-slow training (zone 1 usually) since they’re concerned about going the distance, that they pretty much lose all semblance of speed in the process. These folks would be much better served focusing on sprint/Oly first, so they can get respectable swim training volume and at least decent speed before commiting to those ridiculous distances.